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Thursday, September 17, 2015

Revisiting Terry Pratchett's Johnny Maxwell books

It might sound odd to combine the words ‘underappreciated’ and
‘Terry Pratchett’ and ‘wigwam’, but that’s partly because that third
word doesn’t need to be there. Relatively speaking, there are less
appreciated works among the many, many gems of Pratchett’s output.
Still, there’s love out there for them, and we aim to reflect that here.
In the lower reaches of the Goodreads list of Pratchett books,
besides the short stories and essays in anthologies, the first novel to
stand out is Only You Can Save Mankind, the first of
Pratchett’s Johnny Maxwell series. It was published in 1992. It is a
very 1992 book (One of the characters asks ‘Is it rad to say cool?’),
and realistic swearing is not a feature. Compared with later books
featuring Johnny Maxwell it’s a bit on the nose in its depiction of
children, but the intention - to depict a variety of backgrounds and
relatable struggles - lays the foundations for the subtler sequels.
That’s not to say Only You Can Save Mankind hasn’t got some brilliant ideas running through it, many of them involving early Nineties gaming:

“There was the entire computer games software industry engaged in a
tremendous effort to stamp out piracy, and there was Wobbler. Currently,
Wobbler was in front.”

There were various Wobbler equivalents at school, ones who would copy
you CDs or write out codes on torn-off bits of jotter paper. None of
them, though, planned to make a real time game called Journey To Alpha Centauri
which rewarded successful players with a message saying ‘Welcome to
Alpha Centauri. Now go home.’ There’s realism in computer games and then
there’s realism in computer games. Obviously no one would ever make
such a game in real life.

Julian Fleetwood made Journey To Alpha Centauri in real
life. It was released in 1998, and should take more than 3,000 years to
complete. Obviously we can’t confirm that just yet, but as soon as we
have more information about the verisimilitude of Journey To Alpha Centauri we’ll let you know.

The most interesting thing about Only You Can Save Mankind
were its observations on empathy and detachment with regards moving
images, but its ending counteracts the popular aphorism by stating that
violence does solve some things. It might seem surprising in the context
of the book, but then Pratchett has disposed of monsters with poetic
abandon since. While examining the way in which gamers have to detach
themselves from what they’re actually doing - I mean, try playing any
real world conflict-based shoot ‘em up while thinking about the reality
the simulation is depicting - he also brings in images of the Gulf War
on TV. Considering the ending states unambiguously that some monsters
must be fought, it’s ultimately a book that says ‘Ask questions first,
shoot later’.

Johnny And The Dead followed in 1993. Again mixing lofty
themes and fantasy with the mundane, the main characters feel a bit more
realistic here. Here the Nineties feeling is different: it’s a book
clearly set in and evocative of that time period, rather than a book
that is evocative of how adults wrote children in that time period. See
also: all attempts at swearing in late-Eighties Doctor Who that aren’t written by Rona Munro.

Similarly with Only You Can Save Mankind, Johnny and the Dead asks
the reader to consider something they might see in their everyday life,
to look beyond the surface of it and ask questions. It goes one step
further, again, with its ending, where the dead stop waiting around for
the next stage of their afterlives to happen. Again, it takes the ending
you expect and gives it a little tweak, in this case with the people of
the graveyard deciding that waiting to be saved isn’t all that.
Inspired by councils selling off graveyards for tiny amounts to get rid
of the costs of upkeep, it’s a wry and fond look at local history that
might inspire you to do some investigation of your local graveyard. For
example, if you’re in the sleepy Black Country town of Halesowen, you
might notice a Wetherspoons called ‘The William Shenstone’ named after a
local poet, who is also buried within sight of the pub. It’d be
interesting to know what he thinks about this.

So, again, it’s based around an interesting central idea. Plus, being
Pratchett, these books are funny. You get lines like "You've got a lot
of time for abstract thought when you've got your hand stuck up a dead
badger."

Funny and educational.

What wasn’t clear when reading these books as a child was the influence of Richmal Crompton’s Just William
books. In 1994 a new TV adaptation made it fresh in the mind, but then
there are many stories for children based around the activities of young
gangs, which obscured the link. The Johnny Maxwell books accurately
predicted my personal future with the idea of being in a social group
consisting of all the people who weren’t in any other social groups.
While Johnny’s male friends - Wobbler, Big Mac and Yo-less - are all
nicknamed to within an inch of their personalities, Kirsty is instead a
precursor to several Discworld characters (most obviously Susan
Sto-Helit and Agnes Nitt). She’s smart, but doesn’t really know how to
talk to people and gets frustrated by Johnny’s casual acceptance of the
bizarre. The fact that Johnny Maxwell is deeply normal, for the most
part, is significant. He seems amiably passive, and doesn’t react
traditionally to his difficult family situation. Kirsty, despite being
intelligent and brilliant, is atypically unpopular for her situation.
They’re both outcasts in a group of outcasts, as Johnny talks to
invisible dead people and Kirsty doesn’t really get on with anyone else.

All of Johnny’s friends get satisfying character development in the third and final book in the series, Johnny And The Bomb.
This book, especially, with its mentions of the Trousers of Time and
‘Millennium hand and shrimp’, complements ideas in the Discworld
universe, almost like a primer. That these come from a character called
Mrs Tachyon may be entirely deliberate, as a theoretical time-travelling
particle has echoes of both this book and the existence of something
like the Discworld. While the ending might be the most straightforwardly
heroic of the three books, Johnny’s friends are put into the midst of
the fantastic more than in any other story. Big Mac promptly gets
arrested for what he’s wearing, Wobbler fails to befriend his Grandad as
a child, Kirsty is enraged at the way women were treated in the
Forties, and Yo-less responds to casual racism with angry sarcasm. Again
the fantastic - the time travel, the alternative realities - is
combined with the mundane to great effect: bored teenagers trying to
entertain themselves on weekends, lost cities being found round the back
of Tescos, a race against time where someone trips over a sheep in the
dark.
Another thing of note: in the 2005 TV adaptation, Johnny is played by George Mackay, who was in Pride. We don’t know if we’ve mentioned this, but Pride is brilliant.

Compared to Johnny And The Dead there are bigger, more
emotive issues involved, and as such opinion is divided as to how
sensitively Pratchett handles them. The most striking moment is when
Kirsty tries - while attempting to help - to explain racist behaviour by
saying people were brought up differently, and when she encounters
sexism Yo-less witheringly responds by quoting her back to herself. It
recalls the empathy of the previous books, which is otherwise not as
prominent in Johnny And The Bomb. Still, this is the story I
remember laughing most at for its first two-thirds - putting Kirsty in
the mix with the rest of them gets some great lines - before the high
stakes of the finale.
Overall, these three books are towards the lower end of the Pratchett
novels on Goodreads (other literary review and rating websites are
available), but their average rating is no lower than 3.5/5. It’s mainly
adults reviewing, which isn’t a total shock as these are people who
might have grown up with these books.

It’d be interesting to see how children react to them today. Maybe
the references are too dated, but I’d hope the ideas and humour present
would be enough to win anyone over: depicting a significant overlap
between reality and fantasy, all the while asking questions about the
nature of perception. Pratchett himself, as you might expect, said it
best on the L-Space website:

“So: is what happens in the books real? Yes.Does it all happen in Johnny's head? Yes.”